Mário Cesariny. Freedom stirs, accelerates, affects, is not born, dies in flames

Abstract

is article proposes, based on the verse-poem ‘Freedom agitates, accelerates, affects, is not born, dies in fire’, a reflection on the concept of freedom in the creative process of Mário Cesariny. We propose to analyse the tensions between freedom, individuality and collective subversion of language in his work, marked by a fierce critique of ideological realism and political norms, both left-wing and right-wing. In the context of Portuguese surrealism, freedom emerges as a poetic and subversive gesture, inseparable, unconventional, but rather a kind of dismantling of writing through the use of the raw word in such a way that it fragments and rarefies, disarticulating itself in order to create a discursive disconnection. Mário Cesariny's poetic art constitutes, at the same time, a grammar of dreamlike mediation of the world and a radical affirmation of freedom as restlessness, rupture and resistance to the social, cultural and ideological constraints of his time.